LETTER FROM CAMEROON
THE DOOMSDAY STR.AIN
Can Nathan Wo!fe thwart the next AIDS before it spreads?
BY MICHAEL SPECTER
" L ook up," Nathan Wolfe barked.
I didn't respond immediately, so
the next suggestion came with an el-
bow to the ribs: "Take your head out of
that map." We were standing on the
side of "the road," a dirt highway that
passes through the center of Min-
dourou, a dusty logging village in
southeastern Cameroon. Wolfe, the
director of Global Viral Forecasting,
and several colleagues were in the
midst of a ten-hour drive from the cap-
ital, Yaoundé, to a town called Ngoila,
one of the many sites that G.V.F. has
('
,
"
established in the past decade to mon-
itor the emergence of deadly viruses
from the jungles of Central Mrica. He
nodded toward a couple who had just
pulled up beside us on a Chinese mo-
torcycle. The driver wore flip-flops and
a red tracksuit. His passenger, dressed
in a pale-blue shirt and a matching pill-
box hat, looked as if she were on her
way to church. But that wasn't where
they were headed. Her right arm was
wrapped around the driver's waist. In
her left, she clutched the lengthy tail of
a freshly killed agile mangabey, a mon-
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key often found in the lush forests of
the region.
"Those monkeys are viral ware-
houses," Wolfe said to me, as the cou-
ple drove toward the market, drag-
ging their bloody merchandise behind
them. Mangabeys carry many viruses
that infect humans, including one that
may cause a rare form of T -cellieuke-
mia and another, simian foamy virus,
the ultimate impact of which is not yet
known. Wolfe is a forty-year-old biol-
ogist from Stanford University; a swar-
thy man with a studiously dishevelled
look, he comes off as a cross between a
pirate and a graduate student. He is
also the world's most prominent virus
hunter, and he spends much of his time
sifting through the blood of wild ani-
mals. "When I see a monkey like that
dragged through the street, bloody, on
the way to market, it's like looking at a
I d d " h . d " I "
oa e weapon, e Sat. t scares me.
For much of the ride from Yaoundé,
I
"
"
Wo!fe's world consists of "bacteria, parasites, and viruses''; animals are "a tiny little addendum. " Photograph by Martin Schoeller.
50 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 20 & 27, 2010